The Ethical Dilemma of Intentional Chaos

I’m a moron, and this is my wife.  She’s frosting a cake with a paper knife. - Frank Zappa

The Nazi medical experiments – even taking into consideration the lack of scientific rigor – have produced data that researchers have considered valuable, and potentially useful in helping mankind.  Creating a good from an evil.  There has been much debate about whether or not using the data, even if it helps people, is ethical.  Even if we condemn the methods by which the data was gained, using it could potentially be seen by some future comic-book-supervillain-type as license to sacrifice some of his fellow human beings – and even condemn himself to the status of villain by history – in order to fulfill some messianic role he envisions for himself (whether or not a reasonable observer would consider that delusional).

I have an erection. That's a good sign. I'm ready to go to trial. Lock and load.  - Denny Crane

Computers and cell phones are an inextricable part of modern life.  If you live in the industrialized world, you cannot really get by without at least having some access to these, even if you yourself do not own them.  In order to affect, in any way, the world where these items are utilized and, in truth, from which much of the world is controlled, directly or indirectly, you must make use of these items.  However, the coltan that is used to produce these items comes to us in essentially the same way blood diamonds (and a good deal of gold) comes to us.  Is it ok to use these items, helping to rape and murder fellow human beings in Africa, if somehow the items are part of a push to change the very policies that allow and encourage these behaviors?  If that/those goal(s) is/are achieved, will it condone the next comic-book-supervillain-type, before the fact, to “advance” mankind by being monstrous to portions of it?

I don't patronize bunny rabbits. - Veronica's Dad

Colonialism never ended.  It went from Britain to America, and is now essentially carried out through the policies of organizations like the WTO and the IMF.  These organizations, forged in the hubristic certainty of the ontological truths behind Anglophone philosophical traditions, force these “objective” truths down the throats of a variant world of myriad differing and contingent thought traditions.  We’ve gone from Enlightenment thinking to Jamesian Pragmatism to some kind of post-Reagan-Revolution ontological certainty.  And we’ve wielded it like a brutal club.  America is the Utility Monster.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.- Hélder Câmara

Which brings us to charity.  How good should a person feel about giving to charity if that excess income is predicated on a predatory system?  Even if the individual functioning inside of our industrialized society has earned his salary in an insulated manner, say selling home grown food at a farmer’s market, he still operates inside of a system (and inevitably benefits from it) which has predatory sections.  None of these can be fully removed from the whole equation.  In addition to the externalizing elements from a national standpoint, there are externalizing elements from a class standpoint.  If the purchasing habits of consumers in the country seek out the lowest prices, driving them down through competition, then wages in those industries will be driven down, placing other consumers in a position of having less money to put into the economy.  Now the entropy is locked inside our own subsystem.  So, the externalization goes from even smaller subsystems inside our subsystem to other smaller subsystems inside our subsystem, and we whittle our way down to an eventual aristocracy.  In propping up and even to some extent constructing this situation, even if unintentionally, can we really feel as if we have done something moral by giving charity to the very people we have placed in the position of need that necessitates that charity?  If we neither support their wages through a willingness to pay a fair price for a good or through any kind of functional social safety net or equitable tax system, are we not engaging in Munchausen by Proxy when we “help” these people out?  And as for charity even remotely replacing social welfare, let me quote the following sentiment which seems far more in line with human behavior than that suggested by “volunteerists”.

I'm not that much of a moralist.  If I were I would be donating my salary then to school teachers.  I admit that.  If the man came to me and said, "well, we're gonna levy a tax and we're gonna raise school teachers salaries to $750 a week,"  I would approve of it and pay the tax like that. - Lenny Bruce       

[Dash Dash Dash]

“The Market” is functionally illiterate. - Major General Mortimer Swarthington III *

Unfortunately, you might need to learn Mandarin soon.  We ignore the subjective, contingent, era-specific nature of our social and economic behaviors.  And China experiments: taking the segments of our thought that they find to have efficacy and discarding the rest, and interweaving their own thoughts.  Whatever one would like to say about the human rights violations of China (and rightfully so), we cannot ignore the question of efficacy here.  By backing away from stringent ideology, the Chinese have made leaps and bounds.  Even if we bracket out the ethical questions, still, instead of seeing this for the success of pragmatism and experimentation it is, we take it as vindication of our superior knowledge of objective truths because China has moved somewhat in our direction.

The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. - Albert Einstein

We have mingled ethics and economics and hammered them together where they did not wish to join.  This is particularly problematic in libertarian thinking, where a stringently means-based ethics has been applied to the inherently ends-based study of economics.  By manipulating the inevitably induction-derived axioms upon which their philosophy is derived, they write into its origins the ends which they already seek, and they do it through strict accordance with deductive logic.  Thusly, they dupe themselves into false beliefs, but false beliefs that are comforting in that their parts fit nicely together.  The idea that human thought and understanding might be inelegant cannot be considered, tolerated, or condoned.  So, they massage reality in a way that will not take.  Their words may follow one to the next, but they cannot separate the origins of their thought from the epistemic approaches they oppose.  And this is why a libertarian can say something so naive and schizophrenic as he is against imperialism and for unfettered markets.  The latter leads to the former.  The former is often used to enforce the latter.  Of course, it is at this point that things devolve into logomachy and a series of No True Scotsman arguments.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. - Obi-Wan Kenobi

Back to efficacy, the viability of the “free market” – to whatever degree it actually has functioned and benefitted us – has always been contingent on palming off the harmful by-products of its implementation.  Free markets work inside a subsystem that is able to dump its entropy into another subsystem.  Free white men in early America dumped their entropy on slaves and the indigenous populations.  After the Reconstruction, it was dumped on the poor and immigrants.  Then it was dumped on what are essentially our new stand-ins for slaves, cheap labor in the third world, through globalization.  And now we have nowhere left for it to go but to come back to rest on the middle class here in America (and really the first world).  Bad news.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. - Aristotle

We’ve worshiped perversions of the concept of freedom for decades (really centuries) to the detriment of democracy.  And a liberal democracy (a democracy constrained by a constitution) is the only form of practicable freedom we have thus far formulated in this world.  And we spit on it in the name of false liberty over and over again as our world slips into a feudal structure and we scream in the name of “slavery is freedom” that the opposing viewpoints are just that.  Accusing the other side of what we ourselves are doing.  Unable to separate Orwell’s warnings from the specific philosophy utilized for illustration in his books, we forget that Orwell was himself a socialist.  Just one willing to criticize the excesses and problems of his own field of thought.

Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. - Christopher Walken

So, the question is, is it ok to keep throwing our hands up in the air saying it’s no one’s fault how the world is because not having any sense of (conscious) economic hierarchy at all is ingrained in our heads as morally superior, even in light of its implementation being plainly destructive and poisonous to human freedom and dignity?  The fact is that where we build no hierarchy, one will be built by whatever forces are allowed to.  We abdicate our democratic right to self-determination, and therefore we abdicate our right to the only practicable form of freedom.  And so our chocolate, our coffee, our sneakers, all kinds of products come to us in ways we have to seek out to learn.  And when we do, most of us don’t like it.  But we let it go that way and then “vote” with our meager wallets.  Why do we allow the behavior to crop up in the first place?  Because we allow things to work out with minimal interference.  And this is what we get.  This is not freedom.

"Baby! Up your butt with a coconut!" I think he was prepared to do it! Except I saw no coconut. He, uh, he had no coconut to my knowledge. - Grimm (Quick Change)

China’s going to take over eventually because it is unlikely we will make the adaptive changes necessary to remain relevant (well, at least as relevant) in the world.  And they will not make things better, only move us forward again (unless, as is always possible, we are headed for the last stop for mankind).  The irony that a type of global-scale nation-based Social Darwinism will likely destroy the lingering, perverted vestiges of the more classically understood concept of Social Darwinism would be delicious if it weren’t galactically tragic.

Pride comes before a fall.  Holy Hell, does it!

Who knows what will happen?  We look at the past, the present, and we conjecture.  Who knows?

The choice is for us to say
Completely change or fade away. - Blues Traveller

* Ok, I made that one up.